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Archive for December, 2011

A couple of weeks ago I found myself co-hosting another quiz. Once again, I tasked myself with putting together a couple of music rounds. I had hoped to do something new, so started mucking about with reverb, delays, phasing and pitch shifts. Inevitably I only started tinkering around with these a couple of days before my hosting duties were due to take place. I discovered that I could make some fairly well known tunes sound quite interesting, but not in any way that particularly obscured the original tune (having them as normal would have been far too easy after all). So instead, I went for the usual trick of playing things backwards, but with a very slight twist. Instead of the choruses, I used the intros. Here’s the round -

It’s actually quite easy – two of them sound pretty much identical backwards to how they do forwards. Only this round was played during the quiz (after a number of technical issues), but I did create another round. This one was vetoed by my co-host as being too tricky, though he did only hear it in a busy pub coming from the mp3 player I recently acquired, which has around half a watt output (the cause of the technical issues when playing the round we did use – I should have thought that one through really). Instead, he cobbled together something with movie soundtracks, which probably saved us from a lynching as my other round was pretty much identical in concept. The vague criteria I used to divide the intros was to split those that were primarily guitar led away from those that weren’t. Here, for the first time ever, is the guitar round.

See what you make out of that. If anyone wants to hazard some guesses at either round, sling them into the comments at the end of this post. I’ll try and keep things hidden to keep some illusion of competition going, but if you do see someone else’s guesses, please don’t copy them. You’re only cheating yourself. I’ll probably give away some old tat I don’t want any more to the person with the most correct answers. If you attended the quiz, your answers won’t be taken into consideration if you try answering the round you should already know the answers to. If you’ve forgotten them, that’s your fault and you’ll just have to wait a couple of weeks until I post the results.

On an almost entirely unrelated note, I must repeat my thanks to everyone who slapped some cash into my Movember fund. It was very much appreciated and all for the good of my prostate’s future. The ‘tache is thankfully only a memory on my face now, but if anyone was curious as to how it looked at its full bushiness, here is your answer.

If you still feel any compulsion to make a donation, please do so here.